Research on Mobile Location Service Design Based
on Android
Xianhua Shu, Zhenjun Du, Rong Chen
School of Information Science and Technology
Dalian Maritime University
Dalian, China
xiansimba@163.com
Abstract—Android platform is a new generation of smart mobile
phone platform launched by Google. Android provides the
support of mobile map and location service, which is probably a
concern of vast numbers of developers. So far, the development
of mobile map and location applications is complex and difficult,
and is often required to pay high copyright fees to map makers.
Android is free and open, providing an easy-to-use development
kit containing flexible map display and control functions. This
paper introduces the architecture and component models of
Android, and analyzes the anatomy of an Android application
including the functions of Activity, Intent Receiver, Service,
Content Provider, and etc. Based on Android, the design method
of a location-based mobile service is then presented. The design
example shows that it’s so easy to implement self-location, to
draw the driving trace, to perform query and to flexibly control
the real-time map on Android.
Keywords-Android; location based service; driving trace
I. INTRODUCTION
The Open Handset Alliance released the Google Android
SDK on November 12, 2007 [1]. The conception of the
Android platform is attracting more and more programmers in
mobile computing fields. Android is a package of software for
mobile devices, including an operating system, middleware and
core applications. The Android SDK provides powerful tools
and APIs necessary to develop applications on the Android
platform using the Java programming language.
Android platform is of open system architecture, with
versatile development and debugging environment, but also
supports a variety of scalable user experience, which has
optimized graphics systems, rich media support and a very
powerful browser. It enables reuse and replacement of
components and an efficient database support and support
various wireless communication means. It uses a Dalvik virtual
machine heavily optimized for mobile devices [2].
Android also supports GPS, VideoCamera, compass, and
3d-accelerometer and provides rich APIs for map and location
functions. Users can flexibly access, control and process the
free Google map and implement location based mobile service
in his mobile systems at low cost. Android platform will not
only promote the technology (including the platform itself) of
innovation, but also help to reduce development costs, and
enable developers to form their mobile systems with unique
characteristics.
The architecture of Android framework and the anatomy of
an Android application are addressed in section II and section
III. Based on the analyses, the design of a location-based
mobile service on Android is then presented in section IV. And
the last section gives the conclusion.
II. A
NDROID ARCHITECTURE
The Android architecture and its main components are
shown in Fig.1 as follows [3] [4].
Figure 1. Android architecture.
A. Applications
A set of core applications are on the top level in the
framework, including an email client, a SMS app, a calendar, a
maps-application, web browser, contacts-app, and many more.
All apps are written using the Java programming language.
B. Application Framework
Developers have full access to the same framework APIs
used by the core applications. The application architecture is
designed to simplify the reusing of all components. This
mechanism allows every component to be replaced by the user.
Underlying all applications is a set of services and systems,
This work has been partially supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 60775028), Dalian Science & Technology Program
(No. 2007A14GX042) and Dalian Maritime University Youth Foundatio
(DLMU-ZL-200803).
978-1-4244-3693-4/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE